Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider

Category: Posts

  • Transient Vapors

    When I got home, when I got the camera, when I jumped out onto the fire escape to take a picture, it looked like this. This is all that was left. But only minutes before, as I rode along Wythe Avenue from Williamsburg to Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, and then most of all just after turning…

  • Are Atheists Alright?

    Today on The Guardian’s Comment Is Free > Belief section, I’ve got a little essay reprising the story I did in April for The Boston Globe on the new science of the non-religious. There’s already a pretty lively comment thread. Take a look: Atheists have an image problem. According to a study led by University…

  • Science & Religion: Still Not Settled

    A psychologist, an astrophysicist, and, um, a “neurotheologist” take the stage in a Brooklyn art gallery, alongside donation-priced beer, to talk about science and religion. That should about cover the bases, right? Time for some good, scientific answers for a change? Last night, Brooklyn’s second-favorite online magazine it has never heard of (look out for…

  • Some Sound Economic Analysis

    I know most of you have been keeping up on your Harun Yahya press releases, but for those who haven’t, you may have missed an astonishing occurrence, which I report on today on Vice magazine’s blog: You know Iceland? The tranquil little island nation northwest of Ireland that looks like a flying cow without legs?…

  • Nonviolence from the Unlikeliest of Places

    What does it take to imagine that nonviolent approaches to conflict might be possible? Millennia-old religious traditions? A prophet? Common sense? Certainly the last place one would expect to find it: a race of hardened warriors in a hardened land, where a gun is part of the common attire and tribal feuds last for generations.…

  • Give Up Now, Young Writer

    I was 15 when Kurt Vonnegut blew my mind. Good timing. I had never read anything so fantastically alive as Cat’s Cradle, his apocalyptic story of invented religion in a banana republic. At the time, I had just recently converted from being an obsessive TV-watcher to, inexplicably, an in-over-my-head bookworm. Now, with Vonnegut in hand,…

  • Seeing Home

    I keep seeing license plates. Only certain ones, only ones from places I’ve lived before. Who knew that Brooklyn had so many cars visiting from Virginia? The other night I saw Rhode Island. And I never see anything else—not Connecticut or Jersey, or Pennsylvania or any other. I certainly never notice New York plates. The…

  • Believer, Beware in NYC!

    The brand new Killing the Buddha book is coming out next month, so we’re going to spread holy doubt and confusion all over New York City on June 29th. Would love to see you all there! Here’s the release: What do you get when a Buddhist raconteur, a junior high Jewish messiah, and a transsexual…

  • At the Bushwick Reading Series

    I’ll be presenting a talk called “Living Wilderness” Saturday afternoon at the Bushwick Public Library’s Bushwick Reading Series. 3pm. Discussed are Ivan Illich, Thomas Aquinas, Moses Maimonides, and a computer program I wrote in college. There will be slides, thank goodness, ensuring a modicum of eye candy. First, we invent computers. Before long, we realize…

  • Notes on Bodega Engineering

    If $2 bodega umbrellas are really so crappy, how did mine manage to self-destruct so exquisitely the moment I stepped into the rain today? “I bow to the economic miracle,” says the narrator in Chris Marker’s film, Sans Soleil. And now I throw it in the trash. ‘I am proud that we Chinese have the…